The modern physics (quantum observation) is galvanizing me to make the assertion that causality itself is not particularly useful to us– even if it is true and important– in a health intervention setting, but instead an emphasis should be on working with correlations and creatingcausality.

It matters less how smiling causes happiness than the fact that it does!

In my view, a coherent field description of activity and matter conceptualizes time as more of an ocean with waves and tides than a river - the whole system is available to itself always since it is itself, but perspective means localizing of possible observation and 'causality'. The wave seems to 'happen' but it returns to a coherence that it never left, and that happening is a pattern ongoing. Each wave is unique, but is never disconnected from the substrate of happening, the ocean. So the ocean is itself and is its state always, and its future even, but each wave must express time still and know only its unique state. This is an explanation that would allow 'intuition' to exist - a linear time with causes would mean reality is cut off from itself, which I have not found compelling evidence for.

Maxwell's demon doesn't work on its deepest level because discrete variables don't exist in natural systems, discrete variables are ideas natural systems (us) have about ourSelf yet these individual ideas are not the whole truth. Even in a tamed chaos box like a computer, still the system is beyond the full accounting of the design and designers.

That old adage about correlation ≠ causation is true, but without context of the role of observers this statement loses meaning.

If a correlation drives someone to do an action, has correlation not 'caused' an action?

The truth contains our illusions, and illusions have historically been powerful causes of 'truths' in a socio-technical setting at least, so bringing perspective into science and studies of causality seems our only hope to actually arrive at useful practices and methods.

Now of course, causality helps us mitigate problems and knowledge is power - finding causal links can also let us skip over extra processes to get at the root of effects. So it is essential to try and identify causality.

However I can't help but have a trickster twinkle in my heart about how our observations cannot be separated from our entire perspective.

We observers and researchers aren't neutral, we are coherent with the systems we study!

So the gentleman that thinks smiling is silly because the world sucks, will his smiling ever be as strong as someone who thinks the world is wonderful? His life and his studies will likely reflect his opinions, and so the only way to really 'control' for the full set of variables is to understand the perspective of oneself. Until this happens at scale, all studies will risk being reflections of local truth, rather than the full substrate of truth which contains all contradictions - waves on the ocean, rather than the ocean itself with its waves.

The augmented reality glasses that were talking like they had it, the real deal, the holy smokes, the bonafide extended enhanced amazing powerful joyous reality altering machinery of the finest computation on your face!

Did they deliver with Magic Leap One?

You can count, right?

We’re on version one of version one version of new reality. So yes indeed does it have bugs and foibles. The FOV is just big enough to start getting a taste for proper synthesis of graphics and view. Yet it’s still a floating rectangle of perception. A big rectangle, yet edged nevertheless.

For the voices getting upset that this tech is not good enough, I’ll just say that it’s good enough for everyone using it. Magic Leap One is an overall rad device with lots of computing power, solid inputs and some excellent touches that make it a really wonderful development platform. So good you could even live with it! Magic Leap’s whole team did a stellar job here, thank you!

We’re undergoing a big shift in a tech capability space that was just 7 years ago a gimmicky and searching approach to make goofy experiences of changing the world! Not the whole world of course, just the world of the computer sensor. We had lots of dreams and visions, but mostly showed each other with powerpoint and hopeful hand gestures. Times were dark yet hopeful.

First time using Ml1 at Steve Lukas’ house

Fast forward to now. Magic Leap is a Cambrian Explosion moment for the new ways of computing, now called XR. Magic Leap and Hololens are enough to catalyze the new ways of computing among us who research, create and build. And there are other models from ODG and the tech modules are shuffling around searching for form as new conglomerate companies.

It’s been funny watching the term “XR” come into use as it seemed to emerge spontaneously to signify a merging, or crossing, of all concepts related to computer mediation as applied to human perception.

The Magic Leap One is a very slick device and also a very alpha device. The displays have limited field of view, there are some fun differences between the color balance of each eye’s display and even between their focal planes. It washes out totally outside.

None of that changes the fact: Magic Leap One WORKS! It works well. Well enough to where we are seeing great things fast from an extremely excited community.

I have been dreaming of the launch of a generally useful, robust look-through spatial computer headset. I did not and still do not care what ‘brand’ it is, as long as the dang thing lets me do my visions and stories!

So when Magic Leap was announced I started befriending Twitter people who had an ML1 or were getting one. Anyone in the XR space doing fun and meaningful things. And it’s been so fun watching the people, techniques and demos emerge out of the woodwork around the next phase of getting XR from gimmick to holy shit.

Don a VR helmet and meet John Hanacek on registration day @ LEAPCon #LEAPCon #MagicLeap

At LEAPcon 1 I met amazing people. The Magic Leap talks were inspiring, then AT&T got up on stage and I laughed loud enough that I bet you heard me if you were in that tiny presentation room. If you’ve read my blog at all, or know me, you know that I can often see the very real dark side of any given wonderful thing. Convenience often has a dark side. So I’m watching this space and tech closely, yet also am finding reasons for optimism. Specifically I’m meeting reasons for optimism.

The people give me the hope, especially my newest tribe #LeapNation which emerged on Twitter right after I met Steve Lukas of AcrossXR now Magic Leap who started the group chat. The “Magic Leap” has been very literal for me, suddenly collaborating and discussing with over 50 different talented developers pushing the boundaries and laughing the whole way.

Was great to see a real-life Lumin Runtime app from Sven Mesecke and his team at Rebel Camp in Oregon @dachsghund

Basically every app you can get from other developers on Magic Leap currently is a fully ‘immersive’ experience that does not utilize the UI/UX framework and OS layer that Magic Leap has with Lumin Runtime. Rebel Camp has a real app in that OS environment and it was great to see, even as a proof of concept. This is big and I’m very glad that Rebel Camp is getting the expertise to make Lumin OS apps because these are amazing test-beds to collaborate with Magic Leap on adding intelligence into the operating system while developers get that ‘for free’. If Android can evolve into a XR operating system, I’m all for helping. Hats off to Rebel Camp for diving into the Lumin rabbit hole and emerging with a rabbit.

Sven told me that jhana.space had proceeded me a little bit with him having found it in the forums as I asked the same questions he assured me weren’t crazy: how the hell do I get models with textures into ML1 reliably?!

Developing for Helio browser is very fun, and I’m excited to see what official WebXR support looks like as it comes to the headset in 2019.

I have a special interest in the medical and therapeutic applications of XR, and it was my great pleasure to talk with two surgeons, Rafael Grossman and Alex Johnson at John’s Hopkins.

I sketched out with them a prototype idea that will keep brewing as many forms of knowing around energies, health and ‘trauma’ continue intersecting: contact-less surgery using vibrations and intention tracking channeled through the hands.

They are largely not satisfied with the current surgical robots, and so a vision of direct hands-on manipulation of tissues with a fidelity down to microns without the need for held tools excited them to say the least!

At the Medical talks at LEAPcon I was very impressed by the quality of research and solutions people have been developing.

After the talk I learned from a Leaper that the Magic Leap One is getting heart-beat data and just using it for noise cancelling. She seemed coy as the Cheshire cat as to whether we’d get access to that data any time soon, so make sure to add your voice to the “we need heart beat please!” chorus haha

My interest in medical is currently channeling through as holohealing.com seeking to unite a knowledge and toolbase, with a special interest in human bioenergy visualization and work.

Important note about the reflectivity of Magic Leap One for first responders & therapists:

During training as a California State Beach Lifeguard we were told specifically not to wear reflective sunglasses on the job. If the victim sees their wound in the reflection of your lenses they can go into shock, which just made your job as first responder almost impossibly difficult. Most of lifeguarding first aid is to keep people out of shock. In my years as a guard I experienced the immense health benefit of ‘tactical lying’ to victims about the state of their condition. If someone can’t move their arms and legs, they don’t need you to freak out and tell them that. If someone has a massive gash on their head and they ask “how bad is it?” you can tell them it’s fine and they'll be fine. But that won’t work if they see their blood in your reflective lenses! So for all emerging medical prototypes with ML1 just remember that you have reflective lenses on, so be careful how you insert the ML1 into healthcare situations!

I’m finding humor, curiosity and heart are the keys to making this new medium emerge as something useful. Don’t take it too seriously, yet take it seriously enough to get passionate.

First time I used the Magic Leap was with Steve Lukas (@slukas) showing me his freshly received headset then I received mine on 9/9/18. Every day with it has been a horizon-widening experience. The form factor of ‘holographic headset’ is just singing with my imagination, and then comes all the learning of how to translate ideas to code!

This is a hugely exciting time to get in and shape the medium of ARVRXR whatever, you’re shaping R reality so stay open and find where everything intersects. My research goal is to use Magic Leap and other similar headsets to bring together many different knowledge threads in new ways of visualizing. We are to have a medium for thinking the unthinkable, as Bret Victor (worrydream.com) says.

We seem further along in some areas than I thought we would be and on pace for others.

Overall the thing that draws me in most about Magic Leap and this look through style of Mixed Reality is that I enjoy high quality physical environments and things. I want to expand and merge new aspects into a consensus reality more so than exist in many walled off realities. The best part about reality prime that we share by default is that no one owns the light that bounces off a painting or the sound that leaves my vocal chords as we speak and breathe.

The XR future that I care about is characterized by balance and by a revival of sacred aspects, such as plants being amazing beyond our tech, and real paintings made of atoms being wicked cool. It’s so fun to develop for a new holographic medium while sitting in my partner Kyra V Brandt’s oil painting artwork. A feeling of elevating and grounding of the computer medium in being something humane, and fundamentally artistic over specific. Emergent over prescribed. Gestural and free is how we can be with computers helping our minds and hearts to sing our most authentic forms and dance our most authentic songs.

Easter egg:Check out Universe Creator by Les Bird if you have a Magic Leap One and stay tuned for more from this community!

Video

Now we are entering a time of holographic spatial computation. A magical computer is still computational, a computational magic is still magical. Through our intentions channeled via tools we find ourselves building the world anew each day. Choose wisely and play deeply. Optimism and pessimism are each self fulfilling prophesies.

The Deep Potentials of XR

Everything that follows here are resources for understanding the magnitude of the shift that the human experience can undergo through our passionate utilization of technology for ‘story being’.

I’ve gotten to meet Ken Perlin, who has been an inspiration to my ambition for what the ‘computer’ as a medium really ought to behave like.

Ken Perlin (Academy Award Winner & Computer Science Professor, New York University (NYU)) discusses his research on the future language of AR. Perlin demonstrates his research by drawing figures (through HTML5 and JavaScript), and explaining how these drawings are used as a language.

People are alive -- they behave and respond. Creations within the computer can also live, behave, and respond... if they are allowed to. The message of this talk is that computer-based art tools should embrace both forms of life -- artists behaving through real-time performance, and art behaving through real-time simulation.

Stories:

The excellent Ramez Naam rushes ahead to a world where XR is in our very minds to explore the remapping of this conservative old world onto radically new possibilities in Water. This is a wake-up call to all of us working on this that behavior and choices are more fundamental then technology; we are responsible for a ‘good’ world.

The merger of VR and AR into a functional whole seems more likely to occur than when I wrote these stories in 2015 of a world where VR as used for school and AR happened in the background. It was easier for me to ground VR in stories back then. Now I feel I can ground XR and even make demos. I am working on new visions where the world itself is the school. You are encouraged to view the world as school regardless of the technology, we just seek to augment the learning potential in any given moment with best alignment.

Art by Kyra V Brandt Long before the Wayfair app came out, I decided to see if the ML1 gallery app could handle a little room planning. It was tough to get the pictures placed exactly where I wanted them. Some intelligence with the mesh would go a long way here as I kept losing the picture behind the wall occlusion!

From Magic Leap developer samples, built in Unity. Really fun use of the controller as a remote controller for little 'vehicles' this is a surprisingly addictive little experience that you get to open up in unity or unreal and learn how it is put together! https://www.johnhanacek.net/

Was honored to get a scholarship to attend the AIHM Annual Advances in Biofield Medicine Pre-Conference event. Featured amazing speakers and great insight. Big takeaway was that we all need to get at least 15 minutes a day of bare feet to ground contact. Seriously. Grounding is essential for health.

the heart is a field

James Oschman showed some great explainers and proposed a simple explanation of the heart that I have found much more accurate than the old way: “Maybe the heart is a field that extends throughout the universe.”

I became emotional in the closing session when Larry Dossey recounted a story of telling a terminal patient of his to, “get comfortable with living forever.” Dossey opened his heart bare to the reality of death and the immutability of the energy of which we are made. This truth-telling brought about great benefit for the patient he ‘leveled with.’ Dossey stated, and I agree, that the belief that our life ends when our brain stops firing has caused much pain. A return to having never left is needed.

Rosalyn Bruyere spoke elegantly and pointedly about the power of our healing hands and the oddness of living in air-conditioned boxes and insulated rubber shoes. She was a breath of fresh energy and got us standing up and playing with our energy, which is always appreciated!

Overall this community is brave and creative enough to ask after deep questions as to what healing really is and what our bodies actually are. This is a field to watch ;)

Interestingly, much of what was said I have heard in some form from buddhist texts, such as the dharma blossom sutra. One passage breaks the mind well: The reality mark of all realities is that they are both empty and existent, and neither empty nor existent.

From my perspective, quantum physics has been a de-materializing of the scientific model of reality into informatics and computation (probability, pattern, and counting) which has let it get close to a shared mind interoperation as the buddhist texts have done (no edges to thought, consider where the reflection in a mirror exists). Now still though we need the component of the heart and meaning to make sense of this, and the courage to see ourSelf again and again.

I brought my Magic Leap One with me and showed off a quick demo I made called HoloHealing which had hand tracked ‘holograms’ and a sound wand, along with letting people use the Create app. Overall response was very good, practitioners, even the energy healer Rosalyn Bruyere who spoke really seemed to enjoy the Magic Leap One. One female practitioner even remarked after doing some painting in ML1 that she ‘didn’t get sick like in the other headsets.’ This gives me more confidence that the folks at Magic Leap are making healthy technology, as VR has a notorious and not well understood gender divide, and the fact that Magic Leap was working for the small sample of women whom used the headset I brought was great news for getting this technology beyond just games and toys and into the healing arts.

I was there to learn about the cutting edge of the biofield, but also to show the Magic Leap One to this community. My current journey is in getting the skills I need to build visualization tools for biofield research and healing. There are sensors out there, like BioWell (who was at the conference showing their cool tech) and Heartmath’s +heart unit, which can be unified into a holistic view inside of Mixed Reality headsets.

HoloHealing will continue to evolve as a meditation trainer and ‘energy cleansing’ environment based upon Pranic Healing principles of using colored light to clean the subtle bodies.

Went to DEFCON 26 in Las Vegas for just a few days and it was really fun! The badges are an amazing avenue I want to explore with more interactive versions - the battery tech needs improvement!

A sandstorm rolled in one night.

Really enjoyed seeing this robot at DEFCON 26 - the demo where someone put a plant on top of one of these and it could move into the light and dance when it needed watering of the plant is one of my favorite things I've ever seen! https://www.vincross.com/hexa

Look wearily onward, outward. Keep scrolling or else your inner light might find you!The world is so small only when you don’t go anywhere in person.

To have the stars covered with our light blinds us to the future.

We fly in jets and bemoan the wait times. We have the methods for all solutions yet choose squabble.

There’s a fear here lurking next to words. So I’ll grab it.

We fear happiness.

What if our plans work out? What if we are more common than foe?

This might change so many identities!

The cloud exists and does not, its potential always there even when the skies are clear.

How many industries languish in pathetic under-technologization?

How many humans languish in pathetic over-technologization?

Your computer is not as cool as you think, it literally becomes hot just by using it!

Every problem is a nail when you built an AI hammer.

To think that something is unreal or magical is to take a lazy route to keeping it unrefined.

The games we play with each other need maintenance at the base lest they all mean nothing.

An electric car with a lithium battery made of plastic, try harder please.

A vision of the future with glass skyscrapers and some plants tacked on, try harder please.

There are real futures here for us to build and they look like old growth forests and feel like freedom, while still binding us in the blanked of law.

When I commit folly, you would punish me? No wonder you live in fear and never reveal your folly, for your approach means I would punish you!

But that’s not what I want at all! I want to build a faster plane with you.

Zoom hypersonic jet across the world to help save the Maldives, or at least document the biodiversity before the plastic eats it.

Tourism? Aren’t you sick of sleeping? The covers are starting to get putrid.

You are awake? Oh great! Now get out of bed.

You are a light warrior? Oh great, figure out how to fix the platform of buildings and food production before you give us whiplash with all your new monies and religions.

Want to build a new world? Start with the dirt.

Want to inspire a new dirt, start the with art.

When biology serves humanity will we advertise it to ourselves again?

When we realize that there is no wizard behind our techno curtains we can stop criticising and start critiquing and start co-designing.

Of course facebook has no idea what it’s doing, we trust them as magicians. But they eat and poop and sleep and fuck, sometimes it’s good, sometimes its rote, but always they have blood and are alive just as we are.

Falling for advertising? Try falling in love!

New paradigms are here! Where do I sign! Wait, who’s responsible for this working out well again?

If you look hard enough at a straight line it bends. If you feel hard enough at a straight line it taps you in the back.

Flat Earth is a matter of perspective and the folks just want to play together. It’s like a game! But maybe professionalism matters when games run the world…

You and I we are one or whatever, but that comes later in death, as it happens always in life.

Right now we are creating a middle. So let loose, shake off your feathers and dream with me. If air travel makes you frustrated, let’s plan a new version! Let’s engage to find the pieces needed to make it better!

You get ‘tired’ when you work? No you get tired when you sleep! Wake up and try! Gosh dang what if you allowed yourself a dream that never ended. What if your dreams were controlled like waking state? What if you had no fear that you didn’t know because you had a stronger feeling that someone out there did?

I don’t have the answer, can you help me find it?

We can save the world but maybe let’s dream that it doesn’t need saving? Do victims still exist when no one wants to be a hero?

The balance between the dark and light is a painting of our being. Everyone has different styles but all of us have hearts that beat.

So what about we flourish and look curiously at each other.

A gay man does not make your wife less attractive, unless he does, in which case cut yourself some slack and feel your dream!

A world of serious everything is less powerful than cute victory.

Believe in yourself only as much as it lets you stay open to learning.

When I think I know everything I’m a fart in the wind.

When I know I can be more I’m the wind getting rid of my fart.

Either way, by the grace of Earth’s systems and imagination, something can figure out how to use the methane.